Ransacking The Archive: For Bob Willis

I remember walking through snow to Long’s Bookstore
two men not at work on Wednesday morning
with time to kill before going to the clinic.

The father says tentatively
pushing hands into coat pockets:
I don’t know what poetry is
I work with my hands
I’m awkward with words.

The son knows he just heard one
his heart pounds, he wants to cry.
Remember this, remember this moment:
four wet shoes instead of two
first snow’s filtered swelling light.

I awaken ten years later to think stammer
everything I could not tell you

You were willing to listen to me
to find out the man who could weld two
elephants’ asses together
if they stood still long enough
who taught me that water freezes
and melts at the same temperature
which is not a point at all
or a line to cross
only move¬ment, direction.
The genome of silence and stride piano
is yours and mine together: we play it by ear.
It’s nurtured on the wind, in the shadows
of buzzards soar¬ing at the farm.
It passes from gnarled cedar roots
to the grit of barefoot sandstone.
It punctuates the tedium of making
and spending money, of getting
up every day to fall asleep on the couch.
If it’s worth anything, it’s like a river
laughter, or a woman’s touch:
we cannot know when or how it arrives,
we cannot keep it the same.

I still believe the answer
I managed for you then.
Whatever it is is more
than what is memorized
recited or printed in books.

Letting Go of Sight

I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.

Not This Pig

If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).

Media in Transition @ MiT

Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]

Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]

The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]